Tag: Jewish History

The Jewish Journal invited writers who will be featured at Sunday's Festival of Books to answer the simple, essential question that every Jewish writer is often asked: "What Jewish sources -- ideas, writings, traditions -- inspire you, and how do they show up in your work?"

With hurricane-force winds blowing a wall of flames in from the desert, I received a phone call from Rabbi Mathew Earne early the morning of Oct. 22. My wife, Joanna, and I were quickly packing up our most valuable belongings. Our 16-month-old son, Jacob, was running a fever of 103...

This past summer, I stepped off the plane and felt my feet touch the ground of our homeland for the first time. I was home. For 12 days in Israel, my family and I explored the land, went to museums and had a chance to connect with our spirituality and Judaism.

Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky invites a forthright open dialogue, a conversation about Jerusalem. Contemplating Israeli talks with those governing the autonomous Arab enclaves of Judea and Samaria -- Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestine Authority -- Rabbi Kanefsky writes that it is time for us to...

The way Jews in the Conejo Valley describe it, Joseph Goebbels would be proud of the propaganda proffered as academic discourse at the Goebel Senior Adult Center last month. That's when John Bravos, a commissioner of the publicly funded facility, focused a lecture in his comparative...

When she set out to write the first comprehensive Jewish travel guidebook on the countries of the former Eastern bloc, Ruth Ellen Gruber might as well have been documenting the secret life of a New Guinea tribe of cannibals.

Temecula's wineries and casino have come to represent the high life in the high desert. Since its first modern vineyards were planted nearly 40 years ago, more than two dozen wineries have found hospitality in Temecula's rolling hills and granite soil.

The New York Post may be the oldest continuously operating daily publication
in the United States, but The Forward, which began publication in 1897
during the waves of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, was the first
paper in this country to have a national readership. In its...

Chanukah has always been a festive holiday -- a time when our family exchanges gifts, lights candles and enjoys traditional foods fried in oil. Since the holiday is mostly focused around children, this menu is designed with them in mind.

Why We Celebrate Chanukah ... According to ______________________ (YOUR NAME)

Around 200 B.C.E. Jews lived in the Land of Israel, which was ______________ (verb) by the king of Syria. In 175 B.C.E. Antiochus IV Epiphanes became ______________ ( noun). At first, everything was...

Last Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Memorial Day, Walter Essinger did not attend any community vigils or synagogue commemoration services. Instead, the 73-year-old survivor spent that day, April 26, being interrogated by Ventura County detectives. He was then arrested, handcuffed and...

Atop a small hill in a corner of Jerusalem, tropical plants take root. Nearly black orchids stand amid carnivorous plants and other leafy creatures dating to ancient times. While the intense Israel sun bakes the outdoors, this treasured vegetation grows protected in a beautifully...

When Rabbi Rachel Bovitz sat down a few months ago to read
the novel, "The Da Vinci Code," she was curious about the buzz surrounding the
controversial best-seller. But what she wasn't prepared for was how profoundly
disturbing she would find the book.

Monty Hall spent 27 years making outrageous deals with anxious contestants on his TV game show, "Let's Make a Deal." But the sweetest deal he ever made with his mishpachah was for a plate of pickled herring if they'd join him for Passover seder.

While studying for rabbinic ordination at Yeshiva University in the late '70s, I was at the main study hall dedication where the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik spoke, honoring the great philanthropist, Joseph Gruss, who underwrote the project.

We call it the Festival of Lights, but Chanukah starts in a very dark place.

It begins with two stories, each very serious. One tells of a severely outnumbered band of Jews who fought a powerful enemy for religious freedom. And there's the other, even more painful tale of Jew vs....

The historical foundations of Chanukah are well documented, in the Apocrypha's First and Second Books of the Maccabees and "The Jewish War" and "Jewish Antiquities," written by the Jewish historian, Josephus, in the first century of the common era. As these sources relate, in the...

You've got to feel sorry for Arthur Finkelstein. The legendary Republican campaign consultant, slayer of liberals from North Carolina to New York, seems to have met his match this year, in Israel of all places. And all he wanted to do, he said in a recently published interview, was...

A Different Take

on History

Many modern forms of anti-Semitism, not least the Dreyfus Affair, can be seen as a reaction to the emancipation of the Jews in Western and Central Europe following the French Revolution, according to Dr. Michael Berenbaum.

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